Book review: 'The Rise and Decline of the Redneck Riviera'

MOBILE, Alabama -- It’s a truism among scholars that if you don’t like your subject you probably aren’t going to do a very good job. Harvey H. Jackson III, Eminent Scholar in History at Jacksonville State University, has never had that problem, and in his latest book, “The Rise and Decline of the Redneck Riviera: An Insider’s History of the Florida-Alabama Coast” (Georgia, $28.95), he may be said to have been born to it. Reared in Clarke County, Ala., chasing “submarines and alligators” along the Alabama River and whiling summers away on the Florida Panhandle, Jackson is as far from a tweedy academic as it is possible to imagine. He looks good in shorts, T-shirt and flip-flops, glories in offshore fishing, and loves the Flora-Bama with a passion to match that of any bubba. And, man, can he write. If after finishing this beer-soaked and sand-whipped tour de force you don’t find yourself heading to the beach, check your pulse.

Jackson’s purpose in this book, besides just plain celebrating a favorite part of the world, is to understand how it came to be what it is today. His focus is the stretch of coast between Fort Morgan and Panama City, and the cast of characters includes “mice and men, turtles and tourists, rednecks and real estate tycoons.” Many of the highlights will be familiar to longtime residents — hurricanes like Opal and Frederic and Ivan, the Alabama beach mouse, real-estate flipping, Seaside, Joe Francis’ 2003 “Girls Gone Wild” invasion of Panama City and, of course, the BP oil spill. His sources include lots of newspapers like the Destin Log, the Walton Sun, and the Press-Register; books; personal interviews, including a moving one with a paramedic about the unglamorous consequences of binge drinking — “I’ve seen them dead; I’ve seen them maimed for life”; a bikini poster promoting spring break in Panama City; and even a Girls Gone Wild video or three.

To anyone tooling along the coast today, hemmed by multistory condos along the Gulf side and garish strip developments and acres of tacky on the other, it’s difficult to imagine how recent all of this is. Before World War II, the central Gulf Coast was lightly built, and small villages of fishermen, oyster shuckers and small merchants greeted the sun each day. There weren’t a lot of vacationers, and those who did come found shelter in small, family-owned motels or scantling-board shacks perched on pilings. The fishing was fantastic, especially at Destin, “The Luckiest Little Fishing Village in the World,” situated hard by the 100-fathom curve, a deep-water drop-off that is a sportsman’s paradise. Change came, of course, gradually and then ever faster, with broader economic perks, especially during the Reagan years.

Harvey Jackson will speak and sign copies of his book from 6 to 8 p.m. Monday, May 14, at the Museum of Mobile, 111 S. Royal St. Call 208-7569 for more information.

Down at Gulf Shores, things remained pretty basic until Hurricane Frederic in 1979, when a new breed of people — “raffish Rotarians, pirates with cash register eyeballs, and hard-handed matrons” — realized there were heady profits to be made. Hard as it is to believe, before Frederic there was only one condo in Gulf Shores. Today, there are over a hundred complexes, some of them with hundreds of units. Gone are the mom-and-pop motels like the old Lighthouse, and the funky beach houses that remain become steadily crowded by bigger developments.

Jackson reserves his lustiest prose for the Flora-Bama, easily the Redneck Riviera’s most distinctive, definitive and beloved landmark. He details the origins of the Mullet Toss and even how much beer is consumed that weekend (let’s just say the figure is prodigious). There are strict rules to the contest — stay in the circle, don’t throw out of bounds, the fish has to be slick, and you can kiss the fish, but you can’t pour beer into it.

Clearly, the Flora-Bama is not for everyone, among them the linen-clad and bejeweled doctors’ and lawyers’ wives from Birmingham and Atlanta, who along with their husbands are looking for something more refined and sophisticated. As Jackson makes clear, times have changed on the Redneck coast, and there are now more than enough attractions and amenities to keep that crowd happy, too — upscale condos, spas, shopping, and restaurants with white table cloths, decent wine lists and entrees that aren’t fried. It’s way too soon to declare the Redneck Riviera dead, as some have, but whatever happens in the future, Jackson’s robust and readable history of what we have made of our beach will surely endure for many years.

John Sledge edits the Press-Register’s Books page. He may be reached at the Press-Register, P.O. Box 2488, Mobile, AL 36652.